A Mother and Son Well Coordinated in Theatrical Flair and Acerbic Humor

Robert Leleux is the son of another of those drama-queen mothers: the sort who swoops through life to the accompaniment of jangling charm bracelets, dishing out self-dramatizing wisecracks and using what Mr. Leleux calls “the M&M (Moonlight and Magnolia) Act” to bag her men. Despite many obstacles, not least of them the danger of sounding like a would-be Augusten Burroughs, he has made her the centerpiece of a frantically giddy coming-of-age story.

“The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy” is predicated on a piece of wisdom from its author’s paternal grandmother. “Sad lives make funny people,” she said. So Mr. Leleux has coaxed some head-tossing, high-strung comedy out of the fact that his father walked out on 16-year-old Robert and his mother, leaving them stuck in an East Texas backwater. In their shared opinion the local funeral home was the best-looking place in Petunia. “It figures you’d have to die in this town to experience beauty,” Mr. Leleux quotes his mother as having said.

The breakup of this particular family isn’t presented as a terrible jolt. For one thing, Robert and his mother were unusually close. (As a sign of affection, he writes in a closing acknowledgment: “My mother is my movie star and my football hero, and nothing feels impossible when she charges forth, mink coat abristle.”) They shared a flamboyant fashion sense. They spent Saturday mornings together having their hair and nails done. They had theatrical flair and outlandish humor, even if Mr. Leleux (born Robert O’Doole) pushes his luck to make them sound superhumanly snappy. “We’ll just have to keep praying for a miracle” was his mother’s way of saying that she hoped that her wealthy in-laws would die.

This thought, like many in “The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy,” is not foolproof nor instantly funny. Mr. Leleux has to strain for many of his comic effects. But the book’s bright moments arrive with winning regularity. And at his best he delivers gallows humor with a sprightly flair. “Need I say that, at Beckendorf Junior High, I was the object of mass violence?” he asks of the era when he went to school sporting pastel pants and streaked hair, spritzing himself with mineral water. In those days, he says, he regarded himself as “special, in some way involving flair and class and heat sensitivity,” without connecting the dots to realize he was gay.

“The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy” (not to be confused with the imminent memoir “Beautiful Boy,” written by a father about his son’s methamphetamine addiction) can be shameless. For instance Mr. Leleux endlessly flogs the story of his mother’s lip implants, though this subject matter may not sound as if it’s worth even the briefest mention. But he manages to exploit it for (a) the way his mother tricked him into taking her to the hospital for plastic surgery by claiming she had a life-threatening gynecological problem; (b) how the lip implants led to a nasty infection; and (c) his mother’s implant-prompted lisp.

“Conthidering the men my new lipth will bring my way, Robert,” he has her saying, “I’ll be shopping for new diamond ringth in no time.” When she seeks a cure for baldness (caused by years spent wearing showstopping wigs) during this same time period, she speaks of “luthiouth, thintillating hair.” She also happens to hope that her son will grow up to be like Truman Capote and someday write about her in a worshipful “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” sort of way.

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It’s a short leap from lisp jokes to Robert’s account of meeting Michael Leleux, the “furry, giggling personality” with whom he fell in love and from whom he took his new last name. The book tells of how the two men eventually made a ceremony of Robert’s legal name-changing in Texas (“in the only way we could contrive to go to a courthouse and stand together before a judge”).

But this tender moment, like the rest of the book, is saved from the brink of sentimentality by artfully acerbic touches. Mr. Leleux does point out that “there were those upon whom the charms of our new life were lost: everybody.” He jokes about how their inability to marry meant no wedding presents. And he serves up the reaction of Robert’s very Texan grandfather to Robert’s union with Michael. Right on cue the grandfather comments: “Better a man than a Yankee girl.”

In order to best tell these stories, Mr. Leleux says, he has corrected lighting, reduced puffiness and “altered outmoded skirt lengths,” figuratively speaking. This leaves some of his anecdotes sounding too adorable to be true. But mostly they are bright and well chosen, with a sense of the wider world incorporated into even the most parochial boyhood stories. Mr. Leleux writes of a teacher at his evangelical Christian high school who knew about Robert and Michael, and who conveyed her hostility by making jibes about Robert’s “imaginary” friend. This now seems to him like an inspired and postmodern form of torture.

“It proved Mrs. Rayburn to be tragically wasted in her job,” he writes. “There was a Beckett within her longing to be set free.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mother and Son Well Coordinated in Theatrical Flair and Acerbic Humor. Today's Paper|Subscribe